Cardboard Box

Part 1

Preface

Like many active learning organizations, we of Winter Street Writers prefer to take a summer vacation from our regular group meetings. Reflection and rest refreshes us and readies us for the beginning of September meetings right after Labor Day.  At our last meeting before summer break 2015, we took home the following on a compact piece of paper, easy enough to fit in one hand while sitting at the beach, sunbathing from our porches, or traveling by train, bus, boat, or plane somewhere far, far away for summer vacation:

___________________________________________________________________________

Our prompt for the Summer is "Cardboard Box!"

Was it in a closet, buried in the ground, or did it show up on the doorstep?

What's in it? Who is it from or for? What will you do with it?

All stories should be 300 words or less. Please bring back to the first meeting in September.

Have a great summer!

___________________________________________________________________________

Now, to help us ring in the New Year 2016-- so fresh and ready and blossoming with inspiration for great reading and writing--please enjoy some of the fruits of our labor from last summer vacation!



Gail Balentine

There they are again – two this time.

She paced back and forth and wondered, not for the first time, what was in all those boxes. It was by now a familiar routine – the brown truck would pull up in front of the house, the man in shorts would hop out carrying the boxes, he’d move quickly up the walk to deposit them on the front porch. At 6 o’clock, David would return home, scoop them up, come into the house, smile at her, and take the boxes to his room. On trash day they would appear, flattened and ready for the recycle pile.

Well, this time, it’s going to be different. I want to know what’s in those boxes!

She moved silently down the hall. When the bedroom door flew open, she ducked into the dining room; he walked past quickly without seeing her. Dressed for the gym and running late, he called out a vague goodbye as he closed the door. She headed for his room with no conscience pangs at all.

A gentle nudge on the door was all it took to get into the room. She spied them, on the bed, open. There was no hesitation. The excitement started to build. She told herself to go slow but soon she had her nose right down into the big one. Empty!

White wrapping paper and that bumpy stuff? She looked around but spotted nothing new. Disappointment started to mount but then a new thought came to her. She jumped into the box with abandon and dug her claws into the plastic bubbles. As she heard the satisfying popping sounds, she could almost hear Mama Cat advise: Never let a comfortable napping spot go to waste.

Her purring echoed softly in the empty room.

Beth Alexander Walsh

     Susan inspected the piles of her mother's belongings. One to bring to the nursing home, another for donation, and a dismal pile for herself. As she rummaged through closets and boxes, she was amazed at how unattached she felt to the items that surrounded her childhood. “Formal” was the word she would use to describe both the house and her relationship with her mother.

     The few items her mother had saved surprised her; a jewelry box with a dancing ballerina inside, her Nancy Drew books, and an envelope that contained her report cards and school pictures. Susan added a pair of porcelain kittens that she was not allowed to play with, a Christmas apron she thought made her mother look cheerful, and a dozen ornaments. Her most prized possessions were the pictures of her father. She picked up the photo from her 12^th birthday of her blowing out the candles, while her dad held the cake. Two months later he would suffer a massive heart attack while mowing the lawn and be gone from her life. She outlined his image with her fingers and could almost hear him calling.

     “Soose! Get down here and watch the Sox game with me!”

     She smiled and placed the pictures back into its shoebox. Among the other boxes to be sorted, she spied a large silver and black striped hat box. Grabbing it by the rope handle she sat on the couch and opened it, expecting to find some moth eaten relic. Inside were seven black and white composition books. She pulled them out and flipped though the pages, finding her mother's elegant handwriting in each one. She opened the cover to the top notebook and read the first two lines:

October 17, 2000

Dear Susan,

Lauraine Lombara

 A nondescript, cardboard box sat in the middle of the room for about a week. I was supposed to be filling it with correspondence which I had saved over many years in a huge plastic tote. This was my daughters’ mandate. My son had no interest in the matter. I really didn’t either, but I realized I needed more room and less stuff in my life.

Early one morning, filled with determination to get started, I brewed my coffee, changed into “working clothes” and sat to eat my customary breakfast: a bowl of hot, thick oatmeal, sprinkled with chopped walnuts, a drizzle of pure maple syrup and a splash of soy creamer. As I contemplated the goodness of this homely bowl for its nutritive value and delicious flavor, I thought about the work ahead of me. The bowl of oatmeal evoked memories of times gone by-breakfasts with my families by birth and by marriage. Similarly, these correspondences would do likewise as I read them. Did I need to do this all at once? Of course not! I could take a few at a time, read and reminisce as I leisurely went along, savoring the words and memories, just as I had savored the oatmeal.

The cardboard box sat as a reminder of an old saw. If I filled the empty box and sent it to recycling, the memories will be gone, especially those I wanted to store in my memory bank. Better I should have my plastic tote half full and not half empty. I was very careful of my discards.

Mary Higgins

A card board box measuring 14 x13 x 4 inches sits beneath my bed. It holds a piece of sports equipment that gives me one of the most indulgent pleasures of my adult life. Inside are my Reidell figure skates, beautiful boots, each weighing a pound and a half.

These skates are my ticket to freedom. When I lace these onto my feet, I sail across the ice, spin on one foot flying into the air to land on a backward edge or I balance on an inside edge with the other leg lifted high to perform a graceful spiral.

After years of physical therapy, I  strengthen my back and hips further with numerous crossovers, scullies and edging exercises. Twice a week I arrive at the rink to practice.

Balancing on a thin 1/4” edge of a blade comes easy to me. Perhaps years of balancing in pink satin pointe shoes prepared my body or maybe sailing in a boat on the Charles River sensitized the fluid in my ears to the subtlest shift in weight.

Yes, those skates came out of a box pulled from the shelf by the store employee but once I endure the discomfort of breaking them in, having them stretched in a heated machine to accommodate my foot’s architecture, they become an instrument through which to express music and emotion.  As I progress I adapt to new blades honed to the exact degree that the skating coach prescribes, learning never to have my figure skates sharpened by the people who do hockey skates. Sharpening figure skates is an art all its own.

My skates bring me through a time in my life when uncertainty and sadness lurk like jagged icicles but my edges smooth the icy path towards a new world of grace and pure bliss.

 Liz Ciampa

            A cardboard box sat on the hardwood floor way in the back of the walk-in closet. Packing tape sealed the box shut, but inside the box, tens of notebooks of various sizes and types sat, waiting. Some of the notebooks were the three-ring, spiral bound kind. Others were composition-book format, so that it was more difficult to tear out pages of writing.  The oldest writing lived in compact diaries, the kind in which a young girl of eight, nine, or ten years might record her thoughts and activities of the day. Those diaries had the neat, even penmanship of a Catholic schoolgirl in grades three, four, and five. Already she had many stories to share with her diary, that silent listener, to which she referred later in her teen years simply as “my journal.”

            Growing up in a big old house and the oldest in a large family fueled the girl’s drive to write things down.  Hours or days after writing, when she was calmer, she would re-examine and relive her recordings.  Years later, she selected one college major as psychology and the other as politics. She thought that both of these disciplines might help her figure out better the intensely personal workings of the individuals within her family and the way they paired off and grouped together, often against each other. 

The girl felt like a distant observer and an active participant in someone else’s game, pushed and pulled, the peacemaker, never resting. She wrote down more true stories.  Many years later, she was sure that her childhood had taught her important life lessons early.  At the same time that she experienced those layers of connection and disparity, she felt that her heart walked around outside her body every day. This exposure and vulnerability led to early work at genuineness and authenticity, and she began to tell true stories via poems and musical lyrics. Playing the piano provided inspiration and the language of music helped the stories along. In the end, she believed she could tell a good story in and through the lines of a poem using intense detail to word choice and imagery. Then, finally, several little books of poems emerged. Those little books, their size and weight, reminded her of the compact diaries from childhood.